Internet Dental Marketing

There's no doubt about it. More and more people are now heading to the internet and searching Google, Bing and Yahoo to find a dentist in their area. Local directories like Yelp and City Search are also influencing the decision making process for choosing a dentist. Throw all of the social media web sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc) and internet dental marketing gets even more overwhelming.

So how can a dentist take advantage of internet marketing?

It's important to understand the different aspects of internet dental marketing. Here are a few areas of internet marketing that have been proven to be successful in our campaigns:

search engine optimization

pay-per-click

local listings

Search Engine Optimization for DentistsSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the "natural" rankings in the major search engines. These listings are free and you are not charged on a per-click basis for natural rankings. It's important to target the keywords that make the most sense for your practice. Understand, no local dentist is EVER going to rank for the word "dentist" or "cosmetic dentist". Even if they could, it would not do much to bring new patients in the door because the people visiting the site would be from areas around the country or world. It's best (and easiest) to focus on local geographic areas. Terms like "dallas dentist" and "chicago cosmetic dentist" are still very competitive, but achieving these rankings are possible, they are also profitable because the people visiting your site after using these key words are more likely to convert into patients.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing for Dentists
Pay-Per-Click marketing has proven to be a very successful tactic for dental marketing. One of the most popular pay-per-click option is Google Adwords. It allows you to set a monthly budget and you can target a specific city or even a specific neighborhood. But it's important to track the patients received from these efforts. Keywords like "cosmetic dentist" can be very competitive and expense and budgets can be run through very quickly.

Local Listings
Local listings on google, yelp, yahoo!, etc can generate a lot of traffic to a dental web site. Google has consistently been displaying maps in general searches that they believe have "local intent". This is a great opportunity to rank for competitive words that would otherwise be very hard to rank high for.